Carolyn Osborn was named a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters in 2013, becoming the first woman to hold the title in more than 50 years. She moved to Texas when she was 12 years old and for the most part has lived here ever since. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and also taught English at UT. She made a name for herself as the author of finely wrought short stories, winning prizes and national acclaim in the process, and she also is known for her essays. She later expanded her repertoire when she began penning novels in the 2000s. Her latest story collection, Where We Are Now, will be released by Wings Press in October.

In addition to her literary output, Osborn has been an important force in promoting books and authors in Texas. She co-founded the Texas Book Festival and is a past president of the Texas Institute of Letters. She remains active on the organization’s council. In 2008, she won the Lon Tinkle Award.

This excerpt is from Uncertain Ground, published in 2010. Uncertain Ground concerns 20-year-old Celia Henderson, who visits relatives in Galveston in 1953, a time before the city had been reformed and was still known for its wide-open gambling and prostitution operations. Telling her story from a perspective of 20 years later, Celia recounts her conflicts as she faces sexual double standards and observes social and ethnic prejudice. She also must deal with some personal conflicts, as this excerpt demonstrates.

W.K. Stratton

I closed the kitchen door behind me carefully, caught the screen so only a single low ting could be heard and walked across the back porch through the yard, through a tropical world of deep shade, pink, red and yellow hibiscus, magenta and white oleanders, their lush fragrance mixed with smells of mold, rotting wood and iodine-tinged salt spray. My feet crunched the crumbled gray and white oyster shells strewn on paths and used for sidewalks all over Galveston. Behind me was an old oak water cistern, there since the sea captain’s time, and still used to catch rainwater; behind it the house rose on its stubby brick-covered piers. On the second story Bertha still slept. I’d left her a note on the kitchen table.

By the gate I picked a red hibiscus and stuck it over one ear. I’d cut my hair so short that the stem of the flower poked through it reminding me of the picture of the Balinese woman on the over-sized menu Bertha had shown me yesterday. The Balinese Room, way out on a private pier, showed its guests a portrait of a brown-skinned woman with a red flower tucked behind one ear; her glossy black hair fell in a luxuriant wave around the flower. The image, especially the flat planes of the woman’s face, must have been taken from something by Gauguin. With my short blonde hair, blue eyes, rounded cheeks and a slightly burned-over summer tan on my legs, I looked nothing like that ideal South Sea Islander. Aunt Bertha meant to take us to the Balinese Room. She had a lot of plans for us, she said, as soon we got our sea legs. Emmett hadn’t understood her. Most of the time he didn’t listen well when his mother or his aunts were talking.

“She wants us just to sit around here?” he asked.

“She just thinks we need to get used to the island. Old people always talk like that. Don’t you know? They think it takes time to adjust.”

“I’m already used to this place,” he insisted.

“I can’t help that.”

Out on the pavement, heat struck. My first impulse was to turn and run toward the steamy shade of the backyard again. We had a morning and an evening breeze, but in the afternoons all the winds blowing over Texas seemed to die there before the oncoming sea. Once the sun hit my head at the same time heat rose from the asphalt, a siesta seemed the best, actually the only sensible way, to endure a Galveston summer.

Emmett had left Bertha’s car parked in the sun. He hadn’t thought to find a tree to put it under. I reached for the keys under the seat. He didn’t believe someone else might look there, and if I hadn’t insisted on him hiding them, he would have left keys dangling in the ignition. Emmett had never had anything stolen from him in his life. He could walk off and leave a horse ground-tied and expect to find it waiting for him for hours. I kept telling him he wasn’t in Mullin.

Circling the block, all the windows down, I headed for the seawall. It would be cooler there despite the glare. By the time I found Emmett the afternoon would be almost gone. With one hand on the steering wheel, I lit a cigarette. I still didn’t smoke in front of my parents. Although my father smoked, he didn’t approve of me doing it. Mother had escaped the habit after trying it. Emmett smoked too, which didn’t keep him from telling me not to stick cigarettes in one corner of my mouth.

“It makes you look tough.”

“So what.”

“It makes you look like a whore.” Except for fighting over the pillow, that was the only argument we’d had so far on this trip. I didn’t think it would be the last one. Though I had a bunch of second cousins in Tennessee on my father’s side, I had only one other first cousin, Gene Walker. We never argued. He was too much older and had gone off to prep school then to Yale to study architecture. I doubted Emmett could even imagine someone like him. The idea of them meeting made me laugh out loud.

A breeze pushed smoke in my eyes. I threw the cigarette out in front of the Amusement Pier. Emmett wouldn’t go out there. He thought it looked too healthy. “A nice, clean place for the kiddies to go for good, clean fun,” he’d said, nor was he interested in going to the movies. He’d only have to see them again when they finally arrived in Leon, he said.

Mainly it seemed he was going to go to joints and get drunk or to other joints where he would play slot machines, lose, and then get drunk. I didn’t want to spend the whole month going after him. We might be cousins, but he didn’t feel like one.

The road slanted down from the seawall to the beach turning from cement to hard-packed sand. Before he was born, before cars had been invented, Uncle Mowrey told me, stagecoach drivers had used the beach to carry passengers and mail from Galveston west to San Luis Pass. A coach boarded two ferries during the trip, one to San Luis, another at the mainland where it traveled south to Matagorda. There were no ferries there now. Galveston Island’s western tip ran out toward San Luis Pass and that was the end of it. The westward mainland towns on the other side of the pass still existed. San Luis was gone, he said. Mowrey was a patient teller, an easy one. He knew I wouldn’t know the names of any of those places, so he added compass points, giving me a notion of how to chart my way across his well-known world.

“Tell about Jean Lafitte,” Emmett interrupted. “And the red house. That’s what he called it, the house he built here and painted red all over. Old Jean Lafitte.” He shook his head in silent admiration as if he would have happily joined Lafitte’s band of pirates.

“Are you going on another hunt?” Uncle Mowrey turned to me. “When Emmett was eight or nine … another time when he was down here, Bertha kept him busy digging for Lafitte’s treasure in the backyard.” He smiled.

Chagrined by this memory, Emmett wandered off leaving me to talk to Uncle Mowrey who wasn’t in a talking mood often. I asked him what had happened to San Luis.

“Washed away. I don’t know which storm. It usually takes more than one to wash a place out. People are stubborn. They keep trying to hold on. It was like that here after the 1900 storm. This house rode it out, but most of the rest of Galveston was a pile of boards after. We built it back. I was five then and I still remember that storm. Everybody who was here does.”

I wanted him to tell me more about it, but he wouldn’t. He was ready to take his evening walk.

Driving west along the end of the boulevard and down the ramp to the beach I tried to imagine it without umbrellas and pop bottles and people in bathing suits, tried to see it with nothing but sea and sand, a stagecoach and horses’ manes rippling in the breeze while gulls circled above. There would be no seawall, only dunes covered with rough grasses, and there would be no marks on the sand other than the imprint of horseshoes and thin ruts cut by coach wheels winding toward San Luis Pass. Years ago I might have been riding in that coach myself, riding somewhere further west to meet someone, some man who was expecting me. The wind blew my veil, my long skirt was tucked around my high-buttoned shoes, and my stays held me erect.

I left my romantic past, let it go curving on before me while slowing to look for a beer sign and red pennants. After passing two shacks, I saw the pennants and found Emmett slouched on some steps, his elbows planted on the porch, one boot heel resting in the sand, the other on the second step. They were his fancy boots, the ones with double row stitching outlining tan eagles on dark brown polished calfskin. His hair fell across his forehead. A little breeze pushed against his straw hat lying on the ground beside him. He didn’t look unhappy, just lazy and drunk, completely drunk. He waved one arm in my direction as if to point me out to the tall man standing beside him.

I stopped at the steps. The man who had been waiting with him met me as I got out of the car. “Hi. I’m Luis.”

He was the same height as Emmett, but his skin was darker, and he wore nothing but a swimming suit. Around his neck, on a thin gold chain, was a St. Christopher medal.

“Your friend — ”

“He’s not my friend.” I waited twisting a sandal in the packed sand. Just seeing Emmett had made me angry. The hibiscus slipped lower over my ear. I pulled it free and let it fall.

Luis looked down at the crumpled red flower blowing away from us, then up at me. “He’s my cousin. Right now I don’t much want to claim him.”

He laughed. “Somebody needs to.”

I climbed up the gritty steps, stooped down, and touched Emmett’s shoulder.

“Celia, honey.” He opened one eye. “You bring the beer?”

“You need some coffee. I can’t take you home like this.”

“Not going home.” He wagged his head. “Going to Aunt Bertha’s,” he said with drunken exactitude, a strange reaction, but by insisting on certain details, he must have believed he remained in control when he was practically helpless. I’d seen other boys react the same way after drinking too much at fraternity parties.

“You know you can’t go to Bertha’s drunk.”

“Who’s drunk?”

He peered down at his boots as if admiring them. “Feet sure are hot.”

“Take your boots off.”

He leaned over and began tugging at the heel of his left boot. “Let’s go wading in that big old Gulf. Let’s you and me go wading.” He smiled at me as innocently as a spoiled child who’d decided he wanted to please himself in a particular way.

“Luis,” he shouted, “come help me with these damned boots.”

Luis didn’t move. “I thought cowboys took off their own.”

“Yeah.” Emmett started laughing and pulling off the second boot. He threw them both toward the car where they landed in front of the fender, eagles nose down.

I got the thermos out of the front seat.

“Where’s the beer?”

“I bet they already told you inside you had enough of that.”

I looked up at Luis and he nodded.

“Come on Emmett. We’re going wading.” Luis, standing on the far side of him, put Emmett’s arm around his neck. I grabbed his other arm.

“Hey! I can do that.” He lifted his arm slowly and let it fall around my neck.

Together Luis and I half carried, half dragged him to the sand’s edge. He was laughing to himself. “You know what, Luis? I like getting drunk just so I can hang around her neck.”

“You’re too heavy to hang on anybody.” I kicked at him sideways to make him straighten up, but it was no use. He still lolled against me. We eased him down so the surf hit his feet. “We should have put him the other way round. I’d like to drown him.”

I looked down at Emmett. He seemed to have passed out. “Drunks are so boring.”

“You have to do this a lot?”

“No … not really. He lives out in the country. His parents keep a pretty close watch on him except when he’s off at school. I brought beer with me in case I had to lure him home. I wasn’t sure how far gone he was.” I looked back down at Emmett. He seemed content; his arms were outstretched where we’d let him fall.

“He needs to be out of the sun. I’ll get an umbrella,” Luis said. “There are some around here.” He pointed toward a heap of poles and canvas stacked against the far wall of the bar, and before I could say don’t bother, he’d walked away. I pried the thermos cap off, poured myself some coffee, took a few sips, and began trying to pour the rest of it in Emmett’s open mouth.

He coughed and sputtered. “Goddamn! What are you trying to do, strangle me?”

I pushed the cup toward him.

“Hate coffee.” He shoved it away with one hand.

“Emmett!” I was furious with him. He was absolutely too much trouble. I knelt beside him and grabbed both his shoulders.

With one arm he reached up and pulled me toward him.

“Leave me alone!” Panic overcame me. I hit his chest with both fists, but he held on.

“Never kissed you before. …”

“Let me go!”

“No.”

He pulled me so close I could see darker flecks of color in his eyes.

The heavy yeasty smell of beer flowed all around us. I got an arm free and aimed at his face.

He caught my hand in mid-air. “Don’t.”

Raising my head, I saw Luis had walked up behind Emmett and was silently forcing the pole of the umbrella in the sand. Yellow shade flared above us. Emmett let go of me, reached for the thermos, heaved a great sigh, and poured himself some coffee.

I rolled away from him. I truly hated him at that moment, hated him so much I wanted to cry. At the same time I didn’t want to cry, not in front of Emmett and Luis. I busied myself with my sandals, got them off and still holding onto their straps, ran west down the beach to the little rippling waves of the ocean that flowed everywhere and nowhere.

From Uncertain Ground, by Carolyn Osborn, published by Wings Press.

About this series

Texas Classics is a summerlong series of excerpts from winners of the Lon Tinkle Award, given by the Texas Institute of Letters for a distinguished career in letters associated with Texas. The series is being edited by former TIL president W.K. “Kip” Stratton and is a joint project of The Dallas Morning News,the TIL (a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to stimulate interest in Texas letters and to recognize distinctive literary achievement) and the University of North Texas’ Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.